Aztec

by Gary Jennings

  With one hand he stroked a curiously pale patch on his cheek, almost silver in color. I wondered if he had again absentmindedly burned himself. Then I noticed that the fingers of his stroking hand were almost colorless at the tips. He went on, “My poor Quequelmíqui. She could have endured a marriage to a sexless man, I think. But after she came to have such a mother love for your daughter, she could not endure an unfruitful marriage.”

  He looked out the window, and he looked unhappy. My little girl was playing with some of her friends in the street outside.

  “I hoped—I tried to provide a substitute satisfaction for her. I started a special class for the children of the servants already in my charge, preparing them to follow their parents into domestic service. My real reason was that I hoped they would divert my wife’s yearning, that she could learn to love them. But they were other people’s children … and she had not been acquainted with them from infancy, as with Cocóton….”

  “Look, Cozcatl,” I said. “This child in her womb is not yours. It never could have been. But, except for the seed, the child is hers. And she is your beloved wife. Suppose it had happened that you married a widow already the mother of a young child. Would you suffer torments if that had been the case?”

  “She has already tried that argument on me,” he said gruffly. “But that, you see, would not have been a betrayal. After all these years of a happy marriage. Happy for me, at least.”

  I recalled the years during which Zyanya and I had been all in all to each other, and I tried to imagine how I would have felt if she had ever been unfaithful, and finally I said, “I sympathize sincerely, my friend. But it will be your wife’s issue. She is a handsome woman, and the child is bound to be a comely one. I can almost promise that you will soon find yourself accepting it, taking it to your heart. I know your kind nature, and I know you can love a fatherless child as deeply as I love my motherless daughter.”

  “Not exactly fatherless,” he growled.

  “It is your wife’s child,” I persisted. “You are her husband. You are its father. If she will not name a name even to you, she will hardly tell another. And of the physical circumstances, who else is there who knows? Béu and myself, yes, but you can be certain that we would never tell. Blood Glutton is long dead, and so is that old palace doctor who tended you after your injury. I can think of no one else who—”

  “I can!” he interrupted grimly. “The man who is the father. He may be an octli drunkard who has been boasting of his conquest in every lakefront drinking house for months past. He may even appear at our house someday and demand—”

  I said, “One would suppose that Ticklish exercised discretion and discrimination,” though privately I could not be too sure of that.

  “There is another thing,” Cozcatl continued. “She has now enjoyed a—a natural kind of sex. Can she ever really be satisfied any longer with … with my kind? Might she not go seeking a man again?”

  I said sternly, “You are agonizing over possibilities that probably will never come to pass. She wanted a child, that is all, and now she will have a child. I can tell you that new mothers have little leisure for promiscuity.”

  “Yya ouiya,” he sighed huskily. “I wish you were the father, Mixtli. If I knew it was the doing of my oldest friend … oh, it would have taken a while, but I could have made my peace with it….”

  “Stop this, Cozcatl!” He was making me feel twice guilty—that I very nearly had coupled with his wife—and that I had not.

  But he would not be silenced. “There are other considerations,” he said vaguely. “But no matter. If it were your child inside her, I could make myself wait … could have been a father for a time, at least …”

  He seemed to have drifted into senseless rambling. I sought desperately for words that would bring him back to sobriety. But he suddenly burst out weeping—the harsh, rasping, dry sobs with which a man cries; nothing like the gentle, melting, almost musical weeping of a woman—and he ran from the house.

  I never saw him again. And the rest is ugly, so I will tell it quickly. That same afternoon, Cozcatl marched away from his home and school and students—including all the palace servants in his charge—marched off to enlist in the forces of The Triple Alliance fighting in Texcála, and marched onto the point of any enemy spear.

  His abrupt departure and sudden death occasioned as much puzzlement as grief among Cozcatl’s many friends and associates, but his motive was generally assumed to have been a rather too reckless loyalty to his patron, the Revered Speaker. Not Ticklish nor Béu nor I ever said anything to cast doubt on that theory, or on the equally accepted assumption that the bulge under his wife’s skirt had been put there by Cozcatl before he so rashly went off to war.

  For my part, I never said anything to any of our acquaintances, not even to Béu, about a suspicion of my own. I remembered Cozcatl’s unfinished fragments of sentences: “I could make myself wait … could have been a father for a time, at least …” And I remembered the poquíetl burn he had not felt, the thickened voice and gummy eyes, the silvery stain on his face….

  The funeral services were held over his maquáhuitl and shield, brought home from the battlefield. On that occasion, in the company of countless other mourners, I coldly proffered formal condolences to the widow, after which I deliberately avoided seeing her again. Instead, I sought out the Mexícatl warrior who had brought Cozcatl’s relics and was present at their interment. I put to him a blunt question and, after some hesitant shuffling of his feet, he answered:

  “Yes, my lord. When the physician of our troop tore open the armor from around this man’s wound, he found lumps and scaly patches of skin over much of the man’s body. You have guessed right, my lord. He was afflicted with the téococolíztli.”

  The word means The Being Eaten by the Gods. Clearly, the disease is also known in the Old World you came from, for the first arriving Spaniards said, “Leprosy!” when they encountered here certain men and women lacking fingers, toes, nose or—in the final stages—much of a face at all.

  The gods may begin eating their chosen teocócox abruptly or gradually, and they may do the eating slowly or voraciously, or in various different ways, but none of the God-Eaten has ever felt honored to be thus chosen. At first there may be only a numbness in parts of the body, as in the case of Cozcatl, who failed to feel that burn on his forearm. There can be a thickening of the tissues inside the eyelids, nose, and throat, so that the sufferer’s sight is affected, his voice coarsened, his swallowing and breathing made difficult. The body’s skin may dry and slough off in tatters, or it may bulge with numberless nodules that break into suppurant sores. The disease is invariably fatal, but the most horrible thing about it is that it usually takes so long to eat its victim entirely. The smaller extremities of the body—fingers, nose, ears, tepúli, toes—are gnawed away first, leaving only holes or slimy stumps. The skin of the face grows leathery, silvery-gray, and loose, and it sags, so that a person’s forehead may droop down over the aperture where his nose used to be. His lips may bloat, the lower one so heavy and pendulous that his mouth hangs open ever after.

  But even then the gods continue leisurely with their meal. It may be a matter of months or years before the teocócox is unable to see or talk or walk or make any use of his fingerless hand stumps. And still he may go on existing—bedridden, helpless, stinking of decay, suffering that ghastly misery—for many more years before he finally suffocates or strangles. But not many men or women choose to endure that half-life. Even if they themselves could bear it, their most loving loved ones cannot long endure the stomach-turning horror of tending their needs and bodily functions. Most of the God-Eaten choose to live only so long as they are still human beings, then they take their own life with a draft of poison or an improvised garrotte or a dagger thrust—or by finding some way to achieve the more honorable Flowery Death, as Cozcatl did.

  He had known what awaited him, but he loved his Quequelmíqui so much that he would have endured and defie
d the God-Eating as long as he could—or as long as she could, without recoiling at the sight of him. Even when he realized that his wife had betrayed him, Cozcatl might have stayed to see the child—to be a father for a time, at least, as he told me—if the child had been mine. But it was not; his wife had betrayed him with a stranger. He had no wish or reason to postpone the inevitable; he went and impaled himself on a Texcaltéca spear.

  I felt more than the simple grief of bereavement at losing my friend Cozcatl. After all, I had been responsible for him during much of his life, ever since he was my nine-year-old slave in Texcóco. Even that long ago, I had almost caused his execution by involving him in my campaign of revenge against the Lord Joy. Later he had lost his manhood while trying to protect me from Chimáli. It was my asking Ticklish to be mother to Cocóton that had made her so avidly desire real motherhood. My near involvement in her adultery had been only narrowly averted by circumstances, not by my rectitude or my fidelity to Cozcatl. And even there I had done him a disservice. If I had bedded and impregnated Ticklish, Cozcatl might yet have lived a while, and even happily, before the God-Eating took him….

  Thinking on it, I have often wondered why Cozcatl ever called me friend.

  Cozcatl’s widow served as sole director of their school and staff and students for some few months longer. Then she came to term and was delivered of her accursed bastard. And cursed it was; it was born dead; I do not recall even hearing what sex it would have been. When Ticklish was able to walk, she also, like Cozcatl, went walking away from Tenochtítlan, and never came back. The school was left in confusion, with the unpaid teachers threatening to leave too. So Motecuzóma, vexed by the prospect of having his servants return to him only half polished, ordered that the abandoned property be confiscated. He put it in the charge of teacher-priests recruited from a calmécac, and the school continued in existence as long as the city did.

  It was about that time that my daughter Cocóton passed her seventh birthday, and we all of course ceased to call her Small Crumb. After much deliberation and choosing and discarding, I decided to add to her birth-date name of One Grass the adult name of Zyanya-Nochípa, which means Always Always, said first in her mother’s language of Lóochi and repeated in Náhuatl. I thought the name, besides being a memorial of her mother, was also an adroit employment of the words. Zyanya-Nochípa could be taken to mean “always and forever,” an enhancement of her mother’s already lovely name. Or it could be rendered “always Always,” to signify that the mother lived on in the person of her daughter.

  With Béu’s help, I arranged a grand feast of celebration for the day, to be attended by the little neighbor Chacálin and all my daughter’s other playmates and all their parents. Beforehand, however, Béu and I escorted the birthday girl to have her new name inscribed in the register of citizens just come of that age. We did not go to the man who was in charge of keeping track of the general population. Since Zyanya-Nochípa was the daughter of an Eagle Knight, we went to the palace tonalpóqui, who kept the register of the more elite citizens.

  The old archivist grumbled, “It is my duty and my privilege to use the divinatory tonálmatl book and my interpretive talents to select the child’s name. Things have come to a grievous pass when parents can simply come and tell me what the new citizen is to be named. That is unseemly enough, Lord Knight, but you are also naming the poor young one with two words exactly alike, though in two different languages, and neither word means any thing. Could you not at least call her Always Bejeweled or something comprehensible like that?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “It is to be Always Always.”

  He said in exasperation, “Why not Never Never? How do you expect me to draw upon her page in the registry a name symbol of abstract words? How do I make a picture of meaningless noises?”

  “They are not at all meaningless,” I said with feeling. “However, Lord Tonalpóqui, I anticipated such an objection, so I presumed to work out the word pictures myself. You see, I have been a scribe in my time.” I gave him the drawing I had made, which showed a hand gripping an arrow on which was perched a butterfly.

  He read aloud the words for hand, arrow, and butterfly, “Noma, chichiquíli, papálotl. Ah, I see you are acquainted with the useful mode of picturing a thing for its sound alone. Yes, indeed, the first sounds of the three words do make no-chí-pa. Always.”

  He said it with admiration, but it appeared to cost him some effort. I finally grasped that the old sage was afraid of being cheated of his full fee, since I had left him nothing but copywork to do. So I paid him an amount of gold dust that would amply have reimbursed him for several days’ and nights’ study of his divinatory books. At that, he ceased grumbling and set to work most eagerly. With the proper ceremony and care, and the use of rather more brushes and reeds than were really necessary, he painted on a panel page of his register the symbols: the One single dot and the tufty Grass and then my concocted symbols for Always, twice repeated. My daughter was formally named: Ce-Malináli Zyanya-Nochípa, to be familiarly called Nochípa.

  At the time Motecuzóma acceded to the throne, his capital of Tenochtítlan had only half recovered from the devastation of the great flood. Thousands of its inhabitants were still living crowded together with those of their relations fortunate enough to have a roof, or were living in shanties heaped up of the flood’s rubble or of maguey leaves brought from the mainland, or were living even more wretchedly in canoes moored under the city causeways. It took two more years before Tenochtítlan’s reconstruction, with adequate buildings for tenement dwelling, was completed under Motecuzóma’s direction.

  And while he was at it, he built a fine new palace for himself, on the bank of the canal at the southern side of The Heart of the One World. It was the most immense, most luxurious, most elaborately decorated and furnished palace ever built anywhere in these lands, far grander even than Nezahualpíl’s city and country estates combined. As a matter of fact, Motecuzóma, determined to outdo Nezahualpíli, built himself an elegant country palace as well, on the outskirts of that lovely mountain town of Quaunáhuac which I have several times admiringly mentioned. As you may know, my lord friars, if any of you have visited there since your Captain-General Cortés appropriated that palace for his residence, its gardens must be the most vast, the most magnificent and variously planted of any you have ever seen anywhere.

  The reconstruction of Tenochtítlan might have proceeded more rapidly—the whole of the Mexíca domain might have been better assured of prosperity—had not Motecuzóma been engaged, almost from the moment he took the throne, in supervising one war after another, and sometimes two wars at once. As I have told, he immediately launched a new assault on the oft-beset but always obdurate land of Texcála. But that was only to be expected. A newly installed Uey-Tlatoáni almost always began his reign by flexing his muscles, and that land was, by virtue of its propinquity and stolid enmity, the most natural victim, however little value it would have been to us if we ever had conquered it.

  But at the same time, Motecuzóma was first beginning to lay out the gardens of his country estate, and he heard from some traveler about a distinctive tree which grew only in one small region of northern Uaxyácac. The traveler rather unimaginatively called it just “the red-painted-flower tree,” but his description of it intrigued the Revered Speaker. That tree’s blossoms, said the man, were so constructed that they looked exactly like miniature human hands, their red petals or lobes making fingers with an apposed thumb. Unfortunately, said the traveler, the sole habitat of that tree was also the home ground of one paltry tribe of the Mixtéca. Its chief or elder, an old man named Suchix, had reserved the red-painted-flower tree to himself—three or four big ones growing about his squalid hut—and kept his tribesmen forever searching for and uprooting any new sprouts that might dare to spring up elsewhere.

  “He does not just have a passion for exclusive possession,” the traveler is reported to have said. “The hand-shaped flower makes a medicine that cures hear
t ailments which resist any other treatment. Old Suchix heals sufferers from all the lands about, and charges them extravagantly. That is why he is anxious that the tree remain a rarity, and his alone.”

  Motecuzóma is said to have smiled indulgently. “Ah, if it is a mere matter of greed, I shall simply offer him more gold than he and his trees can earn in his lifetime.”

  And he sent a Mixtéca-speaking swift-messenger trotting toward Uaxyácac, carrying a fortune in gold, with instructions to buy one of the trees and pay any price Suchix asked. But there must have been more than miserliness about that old Mixtécatl chief; there must have been some trace of pride or integrity in his nature. The messenger returned to Tenochtítlan with the fortune undiminished by a single grain of gold dust, and with the news that Suchix had haughtily declined to part with so much as a twig. So Motecuzóma next sent a troop of warriors, carrying only obsidian, and Suchix and his whole tribe were exterminated, and you can now see the tree of the handlike blossoms growing in those gardens outside Quaunáhuac.

  But the Revered Speaker’s concern was not entirely for events abroad. When he was not plotting or trying to provoke a new war, or directing its prosecution from one of his palaces, or personally enjoying it by leading an army into combat himself, he stayed at home and worried about the Great Pyramid. If that seems inexplicably eccentric to you, reverend scribes, so did it seem to many of us, his subjects, when Motecuzóma conceived a peculiar preoccupation with what he had decided was the structure’s “misplacement.” It seems that what was wrong was that on the two days of the year, in spring and autumn, when the length of day and night are precisely equal, the pyramid threw a small but perceptible shadow to one side at high midday. According to Motecuzóma, the temple should not have cast any shadow at all at those two instants of the year. That it did, he said, meant that the Great Pyramid had been built just slightly—perhaps only the breadth of a finger or two—skewed from its proper position in relation to Tonatíu’s course across the sky.